Statement of Teaching Philosophy
The language, literature, and culture classroom is a place where students encounter new perspectives on the world and are challenged in terms of their beliefs and their ability to express themselves. As an instructor, my goal in the classroom is first to help students learn to analyze the aesthetic and formal elements in literature, film, and other cultural products. My students should then be able to move from that detailed analysis to a broader understanding of the social and political institutions that these particular forms either reinforce or undermine.
As a result of my interdisciplinary training, I am able to bring an expertise to the classroom that stretches across a spectrum of fields, including German studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film and media studies.
It is important to me that my classroom is a place where students feel comfortable being who they are, while still challenging themselves to engage with a diverse set of viewpoints. By creating a space for open dialogue, I hope to encourage my students to reflect on how learning a foreign language and thinking about literature and culture is changing their perceptions of the world and of themselves. In addition to this self-reflection, my students should leave the classroom empowered to influence change in their own lives and communities based on their newfound understanding of the close relationship between aesthetics and politics.
As a result of my interdisciplinary training, I am able to bring an expertise to the classroom that stretches across a spectrum of fields, including German studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film and media studies.
It is important to me that my classroom is a place where students feel comfortable being who they are, while still challenging themselves to engage with a diverse set of viewpoints. By creating a space for open dialogue, I hope to encourage my students to reflect on how learning a foreign language and thinking about literature and culture is changing their perceptions of the world and of themselves. In addition to this self-reflection, my students should leave the classroom empowered to influence change in their own lives and communities based on their newfound understanding of the close relationship between aesthetics and politics.
Foreign Language TeachingI believe that the ultimate goal in foreign language teaching should be to give students the vocabulary, structures, and cultural knowledge they need to communicate effectively in a German-speaking context. For this reason, I endeavor to use a combination of communicative and content-based teaching strategies to integrate the study of language with the analysis of literature, film, and other cultural products. In my classroom I use authentic source materials to introduce students to the lexico-grammatical and narrative structures they will need to communicate successfully in German. In today’s digital world this also means bringing a diverse set of texts into the classroom that replicate the different media that students might encounter in their daily lives. Whether through video chat conversations with colleagues in Germany or German-class Twitter accounts, I train my students in the written, oral, and digital communication skills that they are most likely to use in their lives and future careers.
Mentoring Students I am also no stranger to dealing with complicated and polarizing issues in the classroom. Since my research addresses the topic of gendered violence, I have often been called upon to teach sessions on this topic in film, literature, and philosophy courses. I have found that by modeling respect for differences of opinion and by focusing on the details of a text’s form, I am able to guide students through contentious discussions. For example, in a unit on multiculturalism in an intermediate level German class I asked the students to discuss a series of articles about the refugee situation in Europe. The students had a variety of different opinions about immigration and refugees, but they were eventually able to identify and agree upon the biases of the various articles, thereby enabling us to have a productive, respectful discussion.
Since becoming a faculty member, I find myself embracing my role as a mentor for students even more. I have been mentoring two new graduate student teaching assistants and an undergraduate student interested in foreign language teaching. The graduate students and I have been confronting teaching challenges such as gauging student engagement in the classroom and integrating literary texts into the beginning language classroom. The graduate students have interviewed me about my teaching strategies and practices, visited my courses, and collaborated with me on activities for their own classrooms. After a course observation the undergraduate student recently taught an exercise of her own design in one of my courses. From here we will move on to a discussion of strategies for using language in the classroom and giving clear directions to students. Professional DevelopmentIt has been clear to me from the start that pedagogy is a craft that always needs to be explored and honed. After my first year as an instructor at Duke I was awarded the Helga Bessent Teaching Award for my excellence as an instructor and commitment to teaching.
Since then I have participated in a pedagogy reading group that brings instructors from German and Romance Languages together to discuss new trends in language pedagogy. Based on our discussions I have increased my efforts to make my classroom more learner-centered by giving students the tools that they need to find resources on the aspects of German culture that interest them. During the 2015-2016 academic year I was selected to be a Preparing Future Faculty Fellow. This program brought me to different colleges and universities throughout North Carolina and introduced me to the variety of positions available in college teaching. As a fellow I gained a more complete understanding of the importance of making one’s teaching part of an entire campus experience for students. Whether at a large public university or a small private college, one’s teaching should connect with the full breadth of a student’s academic experience and thereby, increase the profile of one’s home department within the larger campus community. When I started my new position as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina one of the first actions I took was enrolling in the Safe Zone training program, which seeks to empower members of the community to be active allies for LGBTQ+ students on campus. It was important to me to have a Safe Zone sign on my office door and to send the message that all students were welcome in my courses. |
Teaching Literature and PhilosophyI believe that teaching students to be critical and perceptive, readers, viewers, and listeners is an essential part of a liberal-arts curriculum. when I was the discussion section leader for the course on 19th century philosophy and literature, “Reality and its Discontents.” Reading texts by Kant and Hegel was daunting for most of the students, but approaching the philosophical meaning of the texts through the writing style and rhetorical strategies of these thinkers provided a productive entry point to these philosophical systems. I encouraged my students to think carefully about the role and perspective of the speaker or narrator in each of the texts that we read. For instance, we did a close reading of passages from Nietzsche in order to generate a picture of the unique persona under which he was writing, the subject generated by his philosophical voice. We then compared this persona to the narrative voices in other texts, including literary works by Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Mann. Engaging with these questions helped the students to link the philosophical and literary texts more effectively in their writing and encouraged them to reflect on not just the positionality of these authors, but on their own positionality as well.
Diversity in the ClassroomTeaching at both a public and a private university, I have had the opportunity to teach a diverse group of students from a variety of socio-economic, racial/ethnic, and national backgrounds. In addition, my courses have attracted students from different majors and with different academic interests. These experiences taught me the importance of accounting for the unique learning styles and interests of my students.
This attunement to the diverse backgrounds of my students extends to every facet of my classroom. In the language classroom this has involved everything from varying the images used in class to encouraging my students to think critically about grammatical gender and ensuring that they find and use pronouns in German that make them comfortable. For literature/philosophy courses this often means requiring that students explain any technical vocabulary that they use in the classroom and designing projects that speak to a variety of interests and skills. This can be as simple as assigning both creative and analytical projects or giving students the option to write about not just the historical, but also the scientific context of the texts that we are reading or viewing. I also make a concerted effort to engage students on a variety of levels in the classroom, including a mix of individual and group work, so that all students are challenged, but also able to contribute to class through their strengths. I often integrate texts into my lessons through a variety of media. For example, I designed an exercise for beginning German students on Heinrich Heine’s “Die Lorelei” in which I showed the students visual representations of the titular figure, had them read the poem aloud, and had them listen to the poem being spoken and sung. By having students respond to this text through a variety of different forms, I alleviated their anxieties about reading a poem in a foreign language and allowed them to build up an interpretation of the poem through their own strengths and interests, including their prior knowledge of music or visual art. Future PlansIn 2015 I shared some of my future pedagogical plans when I presented on a syllabus-in-progress on transatlantic feminism at the Women in German (WIG) conference. The course that I presented at the WIG conference is representative of my overall efforts to help students improve their critical thinking skills and intercultural competency. Entitled, “Sisterhood is Transatlantic: Feminism in the United States and Germany” it takes a comparative look at the literature, film, and theory of late twentieth-century feminist movements in the United States and Germany. Due to the transatlantic scope of the course, students would have the opportunity to think internationally about past and contemporary political topics. Fostering this kind of international dialogue is at the heart of all aspects of this course including the planning. I have been collaborating with a colleague in American Studies at the University of Bamberg in Germany on this project, which could be taught simultaneously in Germany and the US, using digital technology to give students the opportunity to collaborate on digital projects.
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